My friend, You know that Penguin made everybody diversify their links, especially their anchor text right? It made people stop over-optimizing their sites. Well, Penguin 2.0 is making people get rid of spammy, badboy links. Google wants to rank sites with natural links, natural content, and natural anchor text. Provide those three things along with backlinks to sites with relevant content and PR of at least 1 and you should be able to rank much better.
Penguin algorithm update by Google was mainly intended to stop webspam and to penalize the sites with spammy or unnatural links pointing to them, also the sites copying content from other sites, etc. Here are some of the highlights of Penguin algorithm update by Google search quality team http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html .
Actually, you could grab a backlinks checker and see what anchor texts are used by the websites that are rankings in the top 10 for your keyword. I mean, you need to look at what anchor texts are in the links pointing to those websites. This will give you an idea of what anchors are OK to have. Otherwise, if you are trying to rank for "green parallel chairs" and 50% of your anchor texts are "green parallel chairs", this will most definitely look manipulative to Google and they will not let you rank for that word, or will even penalize your site. Instead, you could write something like: "If you'd like to see images of green parallel chairs, click here." "Click here" would be your anchor text, plus your keyword is right next to it, which is good.
Googles main concern is the user experience. As long as you provide kick-butt content your users which in turn should lower your bounce rate, etc they'll rank you higher.
If SEO is your main focus for traffic now and in the future you shouldn't be reactive to Google changes, your site(s) should already be algo-proof, focus on what is right for your traffic/customers, not what is right to get you 'around' Google's algo.
Yep, quality original content is always what they are after with these updates. The more they perfect their algorythm, the harder it is to "fool" the system with lousy content. That's a good thing.
You should read through this site http://www.reconsiderationrequests.net/google-hangouts/ it is the only site out there that will give you the answers you need from an actual Google employee.
i've also been hit badly from Penguin 2.0, it's as I didn't think my site was over optimized, possibly its the redesign of the site from basic html to Joomla, any ideas?
@mobilebay OK, let me ask you something... is your site planetauto? If so you have demonstrated to me and a clever googlebot that you are looking for PR1+ links as its says in the footer, Google made it very clear it was watching activity in forums like this. If not I apologize but would recommend that whoever owns that site should stop being so blatant about acquiring links. also.. re: redesign, if all your pages changed urls and the correct redirects were not put in place then you could have lots all that internal traffic and may only get traffic to the homepage.
Google is updating their algorithm again and again but diverse anchor text have an important place in off page you should try to build the natural links as much as you can. Also you should work on the relevant links also.
@gregevskye Almost all keywords you rank for are determined by on page factors on your site and by some from the site linking to you. The anchor text itself is all but redundant now. That why almost all links to your site should be your url or your site name or click here etc.. i would avoid using anchor text at all costs now.
interestingly I only did that yesterday, however point taken, the damage done was well before that, do you think a switch from a basic HTML to CMS, and the resulting multiples of in content broken links would have an affect? I do have traffic in all parts of the site, just around 5% of what it used to be.